Category Archives: Human Nature

A Nation vs. a Collection of States

Quite a number of interesting items stacked up. Let’s just start working them. How sending education “back to the states” is problematical for the same reason you don’t run a nation like a business; How Trump creates problems he then … Continue reading

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Living in History

[draft] Still rainy, still with cold, sleeping half the day it seems, reading a bit. I roused myself about two hours ago and here’s what I came up with. Heather Cox Richardson on the obvious: that Republicans are letting an … Continue reading

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RIP Wordpad

Windows has deprecated WordPad, which makes my life more difficult; David French on a German thinker, Carl Schmitt, and the friend-enemy distinction, and how it informs current American politics; Latest thoughts from Heather Cox Richardson, about the cancellation of foreign … Continue reading

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 3

Summary thoughts about this book. Richardson tells the story of the past century, of the previous four years (before the book was published in 2019), and of the nation’s first century, in a matter-of-fact style that expresses not so much … Continue reading

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 2

Continuing my fairly detailed summary notes of this book. The second part of this book is about the ascendance of Trump, finishing with the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The third part of the looks … Continue reading

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Heather Cox Richardson, DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, post 1

Subtitled “Notes on the State of America” (Viking, Sep 2023, xvii + 286pp, including 30p of notes and index) Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who has become well-known, in addition to several earlier books, for her newsletter called Letters … Continue reading

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Zack Beauchamp, THE REACTIONARY SPIRIT

Subtitled “How American’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World” (PublicAffairs, July 2024, 262pp including 16pp of acknowledgements, selected bibliography, and index.) Here’s another recent book, which I bought mainly because I’ve seen the author’s name quite a number of … Continue reading

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Human Nature and Existential Crises

Yesterday I had an item and some comments about how the inability of many people to recognize existential dangers like climate change may in fact doom the species. (And explain the Fermi Paradox.) Too many people live in fantasy cultural … Continue reading

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The California Fires and What They Reveal

The despicable Donald Trump ignorantly criticizes California politicians, rather than offering any sympathy for the victims of the recent fires; How well-intentioned policies from decades ago are partly responsible for the fires; How humans might be doomed by their own … Continue reading

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Conservative Reactions to the Los Angeles Fires

The past few days have been fodder for examples of (conservative) lies, evasions, and misrepresentations, as they react to the fires in Southern California. Conservatives blame the LA fires on the vast world-wide conspiracy theories they are obsessed with; Two … Continue reading

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